Book excerpt: The Mirror Tells Its Tale is the story of a woman's struggle to reassemble her shattered individuality and assert her humanity. She navigates the turbid waters of girlhood under a tyrannical and drunken father, of young womanhood in a chauvinistic workplace, womanhood under a husband who makes her life one of servitude. In these ways, the female narrator's life mirrors those of more than a billion women worldwide. And yet this female narrator is unique since she also has to maneuver her way through the minefields of poverty, racism, religious bigotry, class and political biases, and urban/rural tensions in an underdeveloped society. The narrator is intelligent and sensitive but is plagued by her insecurities regarding language, gender, and ethnicity. Her struggle is to triumph over domestic and social oppression, but it is also a struggle against a taught and learned sense of being inferior.